Canonical forms of positive geometries play an important role in revealing hidden structures of scattering amplitudes, from amplituhedra to associahedra. In this paper, we introduce “stringy canonical forms”, which provide a natural definition and extension of canonical forms for general polytopes, deformed by a parameter α′. They are defined by real or complex integrals regulated with polynomials with exponents, and are meromorphic functions of the exponents, sharing various properties of string amplitudes. As α′→ 0, they reduce to the usual canonical form of a polytope given by the Minkowski sum of the Newton polytopes of the regulating polynomials, or equivalently the volume of the dual of this polytope, naturally determined by tropical functions. At finite α′, they have simple poles corresponding to the facets of the polytope, with the residue on the pole given by the stringy canonical form of the facet. There is the remarkable connection between the α′→ 0 limit of tree-level string amplitudes, and scattering equations that appear when studying the α′→ ∞ limit. We show that there is a simple conceptual understanding of this phenomenon for any stringy canonical form: the saddle-point equations provide a diffeomorphism from the integration domain to the interior of the polytope, and thus the canonical form can be obtained as a pushforward via summing over saddle points. When the stringy canonical form is applied to the ABHY associahedron in kinematic space, it produces the usual Koba-Nielsen string integral, giving a direct path from particle to string amplitudes without an a priori reference to the string worldsheet. We also discuss a number of other examples, including stringy canonical forms for finite-type cluster algebras (with type A corresponding to usual string amplitudes), and other natural integrals over the positive Grassmannian.

We show how one-loop corrections to scattering amplitudes of scalars and gauge bosons can be obtained from tree amplitudes in one higher dimension. Starting with a complete tree-level scattering amplitude of n + 2 particles in five dimensions, one assumes that two of them cannot be “detected” and therefore an integration over their LIPS is carried out. The resulting object, function of the remaining n particles, is taken to be four-dimensional by restricting the corresponding momenta. We perform this procedure in the context of the tree-level CHY formulation of amplitudes. The scattering equations obtained in the procedure coincide with those derived by Geyer et al. from ambitwistor constructions and recently studied by two of the authors for bi-adjoint scalars. They have two sectors of solutions: regular and singular. We prove that the contribution from regular solutions generically gives rise to unphysical poles. However, using a BCFW argument we prove that the unphysical contributions are always homogeneous functions of the loop momentum and can be discarded. We also show that the contribution from singular solutions turns out to be homogeneous as well.

We find simple expressions for the kinematic numerators of one-loop MHV amplitudes in maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory and supergravity, at any multiplicity. The gauge-theory numerators satisfy the Bern-Carrasco-Johansson (BCJ) duality between color and kinematics, so that the gravity numerators are simply the square of the gauge-theory ones. The duality holds because the numerators can be written in terms of structure constants of a kinematic algebra, which is familiar from the BCJ organization of self-dual gauge theory and gravity. The close connection that we find between one-loop amplitudes in the self-dual case and in the maximally supersymmetric case is reminiscent of the dimension-shifting formula. The starting point for arriving at our expressions is the dimensional reduction of ten-dimensional amplitudes obtained in the field-theory limit of open superstrings.

We study scattering equations and formulas for tree amplitudes of various theories in four dimensions, in terms of spinor helicity variables and on-shell superspace for supersymmetric theories. As originally obtained in Witten’s twistor string theory and other twistor-string models, the equations can take either polynomial or rational forms, and we clarify the simple relation between them. We present new, four-dimensional formulas for all tree amplitudes in the non-linear sigma model, a special Galileon theory and the maximally supersymmetric completion of the Dirac-Born-Infeld theory. Furthermore, we apply the formulas to study various double-soft theorems in these theories, including the emissions of a pair of soft photons, fermions and scalars for super-amplitudes in super-DBI theory.

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new understanding of scattering amplitudes in the simplest theory of colored scalar particles — the Tr(ϕ ³) theory — based on combinatorial and geometric ideas in the kinematic space of scattering data. In this paper we report a surprise: far from the toy model it appears to be, the “stringy” Tr(ϕ ³) amplitudes secretly contains the scattering amplitudes for pions, as well as non-supersymmetric gluons, in any number of dimensions. The amplitudes for the different theories are given by one and the same function, related by a simple shift of the kinematics. This discovery was spurred by another fundamental observation: the tree-level Tr(ϕ ³) field theory amplitudes have a hidden pattern of zeros when a special set of non-planar Mandelstam invariants is set to zero. These zeros are not manifest in Feynman diagrams but are made obvious by the connection of these amplitudes to the new understanding of associahedra arising from “causal diamonds” in kinematic space. Furthermore, near these zeros, the amplitudes simplify, by factoring into a non-trivial product of smaller amplitudes. Remarkably the amplitudes for pions and gluons are observed to also vanish in the same kinematical locus. These properties for Tr(ϕ ³) amplitudes hold and further generalize to the “stringy” Tr(ϕ ³) amplitudes. The “kinematic causal diamond” picture suggests a unique shift of the kinematic data that preserves the zeros, and this shift is precisely the one that unifies colored scalars, pions, and gluons into a single object. We will focus in this paper on explaining the hidden zeros and factorization properties and the connection between all the colored theories, working for simplicity at tree level. Subsequent works will describe this new formulation for the Non-linear Sigma Model and non-supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory, at all loop orders.

The “amplituhedron” for tree-level scattering amplitudes in the bi-adjoint ϕ³ theory is given by the ABHY associahedron in kinematic space, which has been generalized to give a realization for all finite-type cluster algebra polytopes, labelled by Dynkin diagrams. In this letter we identify a simple physical origin for these polytopes, associated with an interesting (1 + 1)-dimensional causal structure in kinematic space, along with solutions to the wave equation in this kinematic “spacetime” with a natural positivity property. The notion of time evolution in this kinematic spacetime can be abstracted away to a certain “walk”, associated with any acyclic quiver, remarkably yielding a finite cluster polytope for the case of Dynkin quivers. The $$ \mathcal{A} $$A _n−3, $$ \mathcal{B} $$B _n−1/ $$ \mathcal{C} $$C _n−1 and $$ \mathcal{D} $$D _n polytopes are the amplituhedra for n-point tree amplitudes, one-loop tadpole diagrams, and full integrand of one-loop amplitudes. We also introduce a polytope $$ \overline{\mathcal{D}} $$D ¯ _n, which chops the $$ \mathcal{D} $$D _n polytope in half along a symmetry plane, capturing one-loop amplitudes in a more efficient way.